LiveSwitch 1.20 Now Runs on .NET 8!

On June 28th, we released the latest version of LiveSwitch. This release includes several enhancements that improve LiveSwitch for our customers. We want to shine the spotlight on two key updates: our server upgrade to .NET 8 and the improvements we made to client-side simulcast. 

This blog post will focus on the .NET 8 upgrade, its benefits, and how our customers can take advantage of it. Stay tuned for our upcoming article dedicated to client-side simulcast improvements!

Upgrading from .NET 6 to .NET 8

To stay ahead of Microsoft's end-of-support date for .NET 6 later this year, we have upgraded our media server and relevant service components to .NET 8. Microsoft’s .NET 8 promises several improvements, but the most notable one for LiveSwitch is the optimized thread scheduling, which significantly boosts the performance of our multi-threaded processes. 

The Benefits

Our tests show that the upgrade to .NET 8 has massively increased the number of SFU connections that can be handled per core by 70%. This improvement is consistent across different combinations of resolution and frame rates we used in our testing (i.e. 480p at 30fps, 640p at 30fps, 1080p at 5fps). For example, if our server could handle 70 connections per core using 480p resolution and 30 frames per second before the upgrade, this number increased to 120 connections per core after updating to LiveSwitch 1.20. 

This also means that the server resources needed for the same number of connections are reduced by approximately 43%. The performance improvements in .NET 8 translate into optimized resource utilization in our media servers, potentially leading to cost savings for our LiveSwitch Server customers as well. 

We anticipate additional performance improvements from .NET 8 and will share any positive findings with you.

Who Will Benefit from This Upgrade?

Our team is excited about the cost savings this introduces to our infrastructure - maybe it means more pizza and donuts for us! Jokes aside, we are optimistic that our LiveSwitch Server customers will also experience significant savings on their infrastructure costs when they update to LiveSwitch 1.20.

How Can You Take Advantage of This Upgrade?

Our LiveSwitch Server customers can download LiveSwitch version 1.20 here. This update is backward compatible, meaning that our customers are not required to update their client SDKs immediately if it is not feasible. This allows you to upgrade to 1.20 quicker and start reaping the benefits! 

We also encourage our customers to run their own load tests before rolling this update out to production systems. Our calculations are based on our standard LiveSwitch architecture, and the results may vary depending on your use case and infrastructure configuration.

Your load tests should determine the new CPU utilization for your specific use case. If you have a capacity threshold set before this update, it will not be automatically overwritten. With the load test results, you can then update the appropriate encoding configuration with CPU credit amounts and configure the credits per CPU as well. You can also review our existing documentation on how to set server capacity thresholds. It covers some sample calculations that would help determine the types of credit values to set for each encoding use case. All of these parameters can be updated in the LiveSwitch Server console.

To learn more about our LiveSwitch 1.20 release, please check out our release notes here.

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